“WE ARE THE FOSSIL-FUEL FREEDOM FIGHTERS”

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Your days should be bright and bountiful, but where do your misgivings go? Another generation, one bathed in the sweet prison of the well-appointed classroom as an adjunct to the blandishments of social media, is now on the scene, and they are ready to take over. Here is a Yale proudcut, 27 at the time of publication, in the 2016 anthology Coming of Age at the End of Nature: A Generation Faces Living On a Changed Planet:

Instead of trying to ‘save the world,” my generation is building the new institutions and industries that will support a just and resilient world. We’re changing systems, we’re changing rules and we’re hiring.

We who have come of age after the end of nature know that we have inherited damaged goods, but we’re strong and we’re smart, and we can and we will rebuild.

And most importantly, we have found our very calling in doing so. We are the cool kids; “we were created to be awesome,” says Kid President. We are the ones building past the assumptions handed to us, the ones building a safer, more equitable, more durable world. We are the fossil-fuel freedom fighters.

Who will tell her, unlike her professors and parents and authors and social media sponsors, that she is a little late? That all this Montessori hortatory uplift is just another fake from the supersystem, which delights in absorbing aspirational claptrap as it pumps ever more carbon dioxide skyward and oceanward?

A few of us knew that none of this was right, from the beginning. The Vietnam War was an awful way to first engage with social reality – a bestial, genocidal bombing slaughter of non-white peoples that gathered enormous allegiance from the true-bluers who have now given us the horrific reign of the Damn Turd Pol. What has gotten better?

The US war machine has enjoyed its opportunities to rain ever greater munitions dumps from the sky to the non-white Third World craters of the Middle East, but the “cool kids” have been so well-protected by the comforts of the classroom that they are ready to change social reality, “change the rules” of natural selection (to the worst goes the spoils) with one start-up. They are even borrowing the terms of the fascist regime: they are the “fossil-fuel freedom fighters.” The weaponry of murder and wholesale slaughter are now, finally, going to be directed away from killing Vietnamese, Cambodians, Panamanians, Iraqis, Yemenese, Afghanis, upon – who, now? What, exactly, is going to be targeted with technowar extermination by these new hiring green CEOs and green junior HR vice-presidents of the green start-up funded by excess hedge fund VR capital?

Yes, you are “strong and smart,” or so you’ve been fatuously told, but social institutions are not going to be the pushovers that your head-patting, tolerant elders may have suggested they were. You are, in fact, not strong and not smart, not in the least, not compared with the strength of a melting glacier, or the strength of a denuded forest, or the strength of a forest fire, or heat wave, or flood, or rampaging corporation. You ain’t building shit.

However, we do understand that you are hiring, so can we send you a resume?